Desert Dystopias: Liminal Spaces and Times in Medievalist Post-Apocalyptic Works

In popular culture, the Middle Ages has often been considered a liminal dark and barbaric age at odds with modernity (Freedman and Spiegel 677-8). Similarly, from an Eurocentric perspective tied to histories of colonial and environmental violence, the desert—associated with emptiness, barrenness, and decline—and its inhabitants has been regarded as belonging to a marginal, hostile space of alterity (Osuna and Tyna 2-3). However, both the liminal temporal dimension of the Middle Ages and the liminal space of the desert occupy a central position in numerous post apocalyptic and dystopian works, where the respective stereotypical perceptions of both are either repeated or critically reflected upon. Where, during the Middle Ages, the desert was conceived in ambivalent terms—both as a utopian paradise and as a space of temptation, conflict, and exile—in works such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), the Mad Max franchise (1979-2024), and Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) that imagine the future as the new “Dark Ages,” the desert seems to acquire distinctively dystopian traits. The neomedieval space of the desert becomes tied to ecological degradation, struggles for survival and power, and social inequalities. While in each work the desert serves to evoke multiple contemporary concerns—from colonial and imperial ventures, nuclear testing, to climate change and resource scarcity—all use the desert and the medieval as worldbuilding tools to characterize bleak scenarios of scarcity and ruin that adhere to what Aidan Tynan defines “wasteland aesthetics” (16-22). By employing the framework of ecomedievalism, which considers works of medievalism through an ecocritical lens (Johnson 31), I explore how such liminal temporal and special dimensions become central to the representation of conflicts in the works considered and the implications of how the modern perception of the Middle Ages and of the desert mutually inform each other.